Susan's got talent. Pity there's a dark side

Helen Elliott

JANE Austen might have called Susan Boyle "ill-favoured". It's a gentle code to say what can't be said plainly — plain being a crucial word here — that the Graces who dish out favours around a baby's cradle were niggards with Susan Boyle. But they granted her this one thing: an exceptional voice.

Boyle, as everyone with electricity now knows, is the Scottish woman whose performance on the talent show Britain's Got Talent, has had the world twittering for a week. The performance, in which she sings I Dreamed a Dream, has been viewed nearly 50 million times on that vocabulary of emotion, YouTube. Oprah has invited her as a guest on her show, Larry King Live has already spoken to her, recording studios want her to sign and newspapers worldwide are tracking her every move. This is Fame.

YouTube star swamped by press

The Susan Boyle Story begins as a classic Cinderella fairy tale with the unnoticed woman doing the chores in her ordinary house in her ordinary village, one of eight children, caring for her mother until she dies, and using her one spectacular gift, her voice, to the greater glory of her God. A useful, quiet, unthreatening life.

But it must be unsettling having a gift like that. Was it hearing people with far less talent being praised and fawned upon that made her audition for the talent quest?

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The Cinderella tale swerves into another fairy tale, a tale of trial and testing. There are three judges of this quest, two men and a woman. The woman is very beautiful. And young. She says little and looks embarrassed. The men are about Boyle's age, late 40s, and each with a dizzying self-confidence.

The disrespect ingrained in their carelessness even to try to disguise their disdain for this middle-aged woman who strides onto the stage has made every woman of sensibility who has seen this want to reach for her pearl-handled Smith and Wesson 640. Boyle's stride, so newly learned, so patently fake, signals bravado at every step. "Go back," you want to scream. "Save yourself!"

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She is nervous, but she's used to men treating her as a joke. However, like every heroine there ever was, she knows she can rely on her secret, the golden voice. So she opens her mouth and out it pours; a voice so true that the air which carries it trembles.

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The power shifts, the three judges are shown shocked, then humbled and the cynical audience that was getting ready for the malicious frisson of yet another badly dressed old biddy who thinks she's got talent find themselves disarmed. You see all this clearly as the camera pans across their faces. Many individual dreams are being realised in that voice.

But overcoming this first trial is only the beginning of Boyle's quest in both the spotlight and in her real life. It's the worldly temptations that the formerly niggardly fates are now strewing in her path that will require more fortitude than bravado.

A week ago she was an unnoticed, unemployed woman living in a small town, a woman who in her own words "has never been kissed". How will she deal with the avalanche of fame?

But beneath the electronically carried fairy tale there's a darker story. Is Boyle a sensation because of her remarkable voice? And what is the extent of the voice anyway? It was impossible to judge because of the roaring of the crowd. It is certainly remarkable, but is it rare? Which raises the delicate and endlessly resonating question at the heart of all this: is she a sensation because, looking as she does, she should not be qualified to have such a gift?

We love stories about battlers who make it against the odds and she's the one who has broken through. A fairy tale for our times via YouTube. But isn't she just the old freak show newly dressed? You also have to ask just how manufactured is the phenomenon of Susan Boyle?

An audition is mandatory before you get on these quests, so someone knew exactly what they were setting up right from the outset.

Those questions aside, will we still love her, weep for her when she has had her eyebrows plucked, her chin remodelled, her hair done by stylists and so on, when the Cinderella fairy tale transforms into Beauty and the Beast? That tale is about how the love of a beautiful woman transforms the ugly beast into a handsome prince. Hundreds of years ago when these tales evolved, beauty was everything. The highest prize. Not much has changed.

What will the love of 50 million do for Boyle?

What are these talent quests, after all, but the modern fairy tales that reiterate and act out some of our most primitive emotions, not all of them attractive — as when comedian Russell Brand offered publicly to "relieve her of her virginity". Now didn't that just make you want to release the safety catch on your Smith and Wesson?